The installation of my work went fairly smoothly, in hindsight. I made some decisions that seemed natural at the time though I would’ve completely forgotten about them had I not documented my thought process and physical progress within the space.

Here I am, pictured setting up my workstation for the week. I spent most of my time at the gallery soldering and testing these two oscillators; they gave me a lot of trouble. I had created a schedule for myself – finish soldering the oscillators on Wednesday, work on setting up the train sequencing on Thursday and Friday, stay late to finalise the looks on Friday evening. By Thursday daytime I was over-schedule and had not yet completed the oscillators, but managed to get one working well and one juuuust working enough to sound.

I altered my idea somewhat during the installation process, simplifying some aspects and altering the aesthetic choices slightly. It began as a project about early memories, but as I constructed it I realised that this had almost nothing to do with any of my own early memories – I never played with toy trains, and it didn’t take me back to my childhood at all. However, setting up my oscillators and making them work with the train felt like a liberating form of playtime that I hadn’t experienced for a while. Hence the adjustment of my concept to focus on childlike playing, casting off the shroud of adulthood to rekindle the curiosity and glee of my more diminutive years.

My project is about memory, early memory.

It will centre around a model railway in the middle of the room, running continuously on a circle of track. This represents playful thinking and promotes the curation of a childish perspective within the viewer.

There will be several speakers dangling from the ceiling. These will be a variety of sizes and will all be passive speaker drivers without housing. I would say that I am planning to have no more than 6 of these speakers, but whether or not I will have enough audio for 6 speakers is to be seen. These speakers will be mostly very small, between 2 and 5 inch cones, and I will be providing a couple of them from my own collection. The rest would have to be sourced from the sound arts department. In terms of amplification, I’ve been building my own amps but won’t have enough of my own amps to power all of the cones.

Each speaker will be outputting a single sound source. Some of these sources will be home-made oscillators. I have already built a working prototype. Some of the sound sources will be tape decks (probably loaded with loops) playing back recordings of my friends talking about some of their early memories.

These sources will be triggered by the movement of the train. I’m currently testing a method of creating a CV ping by having the forward motion of the train connect two electrical contacts as it brushes past.

I think that lighting is not to be underestimated, and bad lighting could have a very strong impact on the work. Either I leave natural light, or I use blackout curtains (yet to be sourced) to create artificial darkness, and then light the scene with a couple of lamps.

Visually, I’m going to leave all circuitry and wiring very noticeable. I think it will add to the curious toy-centered narrative and really enhance the notion that memories are fragile, sometimes constructed and wholly imperfect.

Tonight I begin oscillator testing. A simple square wave astable multivibrator has worked for my oscillator needs in the past (although those were LFO’s triggering an LED, I wonder if these oscillators will sound good at audio rate. Perhaps sounding ‘good’ doesn’t really matter. If they generate sound then I’m happy.). I’ve just spent the day recording a band with a friend, I am quite exhausted but I recognise the urgency of this exhibition so I’m pushing myself to fit in time for experimentation whenever I can. I have a week and a half to create SOMETHING, and I may have a lead on a model railway I can borrow….

2 hours later:

Learnt a lot today, but I still haven’t landed on an exact design that is usable using components I have lying around. I can’t seem to get my pots to work as I think they should be working, but that may be the tiredness – I suspect that components can sense tiredness and have some method of altering their functionality when in the presence of too much of the stuff. I learnt a rough formula of ratios of feedback resistor+drain capacitor to create different frequencies of oscillation, I learnt that there seems to be a lower bound value for my feedback resister (10 ohms is below that threshold, 500 is above – I have no finer resolution resistors and have no desire to work this exact figure out at this time), I learnt that despite the schematic being labelled with polarised capacitors I can use non-polarised mylar-poly capacitors with much the same effect (I have an abundance of low nano-farad non-polarised capacitors which will come in handy as I do not have many high value resistors – high value being relative to the tuning of this particular oscillator topology).

Despite all of this great knowledge, I still haven’t figured out a combination of potentiometer and capacitor that will achieve the desired frequency sweep range. The only working combo I have found uses a 500kOhm logarithmic pot which is too fine a control to use reliably as the upper bounds of Ohmage (new word?) occupy such a small sweep of the wiper and such a large frequency range. I’m talking ~1mm rotation controlling around a quarter of the audible frequency range.

Experiments will continue tomorrow evening (hopefully I will find time).

I’ve had a long think about what is actually required of me to create an exhibition that is akin to what I have in my head. A model railway, multiple speakers (possibly single point source for each sound object?) lots of DIY circuitry (oscillators, filters, VCA’s), several tape loops and some sort of interactive controls for the viewer, possibly LDR’s under the train tracks to trigger some of my sources.

This is a lot of work.

I should begin soon.

And refine my idea to set realistic parameters/goals for myself.

Time ticks ever onwards. (10 days until we begin install)

In light of these revelations, I’m cutting back my idea somewhat to make it a more realistic target. In Milo’s last lecture he talked briefly about distilling your idea to a single-dimension – what is the most central thing about the idea? For me, that’s the railway. Everything else is an add on. In terms of audio content, either I go with recorded sound or synthesized sound. If it’s recorded, the easiest way for that to be done reliably (by me) is by using tape decks. If it’s synthesized I would like to construct a few simple oscillators with VCAs, perhaps a filter or two if I can manage that (although it’s occurring to me now that speakers are a form of filter – cones have limited bandwidth and I can use that to my advantage via routing). How practical is the idea of constructing my first ever synth in under 10 days? I’m unsure. But I would like to push myself.

Distilling my idea means removing all unnecessary things. The railway stays, and I must either decide on synthesizers or recorded audio. The easiest synth I can imagine is an oscillator and a VCA power amp driving a speaker cone, with the CV input being ‘pinged’ by something. That something could simply be a pair of naked wires hanging in the path of the train, with a conductive strip of metal on the train bridging the gap momentarily as it passes. This could help to signify the fragility of memory.

Still gotta procure a model railway from somewhere, too.

And modify that slightly, perhaps.

Two notebook pages, the first being from the day before the initial exhibition visit, the second being from the day of the exhibition. The first page discusses concepts and methods of interactivity: I was thinking about reading excerpts from my past notebooks which go back maybe as much as 7 or 8 years. This concept would be exploring memory and how much we forget, and also putting an intimate (yet curated) part of myself on display. Another thought was continuing my exploration of sounds I like (a concept from one of the two assignments so far this year), by bringing objects into the gallery space and exciting them using actuators. In essence, moving my comforting and familiar sounds into an unfamiliar and alien environment to be displayed.

This is all valuable stuff, but I reckon the second page is more intriguing.

I had a mental image, whilst standing in one of the rooms, of walking in on a small model railway quietly running away on its own. This immediately captured my attention, and I thought about the implications of such an idea, the logistics, the potential artistic meaning and sentiment behind the idea. Also, how to involve sound in the concept. My first conceptual thoughts were about memory; the railway is an icon of ones childhood, and thoughts came to mind of how memories can be thrust upon the unsuspecting individual by specific, intimately familiar external phenomenon. Smells, tastes, sounds, the works.

I thought about audio playback. What audio was going to be sounding in the room? How do I represent memories? Pings or clicks may be nice, as memories can be so transient. But maybe swelling oscillators, creating a slowly fading, blissful, patchwork drone; memories can be so warming. I could wire things up to my MS-20 to create envelopes; it has an audio input on the front panel.

But I would firmly like to be DIY with this project. This will be talked about in another post.

The railway is pictured on a semicircular track, I had envisioned it going from right to left and then back again, pinging and ponging away. Each time it reaches the end buffer, it triggers audio through a speaker (logistically this would be achieved with contacts, perhaps a battery on the train itself connecting the circuit to create a CV ‘ping’ whenever the train contacts touch at each end) which could relate to either a memory remembered or the trigger which caused that memory to resurface. Ideally the train would move at variable speed, creating a variable rhythm of ‘memories triggered’.

Either the train speed could be modulated, or there could be a visitor-controlled potentiometer that encourages playfulness in a childish manner. I was also musing on having tape loops around the room on multichannel cassette machines (I have a few available for such a purpose) enabling people to mess with the balance and tonality of each 4 channel loop. Also thought about (idea triggered by Inaki) having a few machines with self contained loops (i.e loops within the tape shell) that people could swap out at will.

Although this isn’t strictly a sound installation as its method of presentation is not in-person but rather stereo capture, I decided to make a note of it because of it’s interesting usage of space. On top of this, it was produced during 2020 which means that the decision to present it as a work of documentation rather than an in-person event may have been related to pandemic life. Anyway, on to the piece.

Seliverstov is toying with ideas around re-amping field recordings in different spaces. He takes several field recordings of oceans and birds and plays them from various tape machines – mostly microcassette dictaphones – which are then recorded by his 4-mic array. He shuffles around the dictaphones over time to ‘compose’ the work, creating dynamics and curating the spatial positioning of each recording.

I think that works like this have a lot of potential to be reapplied to a gallery space. Sound sources can be moved within a space independently of the listener, perhaps by suspending them and using large fans to spin speakers, perhaps by placing them on a turntable, or model railway.

If you refer to Seliverstrov’s Instagram account (linked below, embed function wasn’t playing ball) you can see that he has continued to expand on this work, collaborating with another sound artist to create ‘birds’ out of Buchla modular synths and then working those recordings into his explorations of space. All very applicable to a gallery space I feel, although I’m unsure what the artistic message behind this is.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CXN7H2gFB4K/

Setup by Volkswagen in 2009 this is a quaint example of how evoking childish delight in mundane tasks can increase our tendency to do said tasks. It’s a simple premise, but most good ideas are.

I find this installation interesting as it takes place outside of a gallery space in a world where art isn’t necessarily there to be studied and interpreted, but experienced and enjoyed. This installation comments on how we abstain from engaging in useful daily practises because they are repetitive and forgettable, and I firmly believe that by sparking joy in such experiences we can make the world a significantly better place to traverse – just because we are adults does not mean we can’t ‘play’ with the things around us.

It is akin to hacking into our brains, providing a ‘reward’ for putting rubbish in bins which is an activity that has very little short term joy on its own. (In my experience) Our brains are particularly bad at long term planning, and this seems to be a method of circumventing this.

Touched upon briefly in my last blog post, I have been struggling to tie my ideas together, or even to find the next thread to pull. It seems as though I am coming to the end of this thematic cul-de-sac and am genuinely surprised to find a dead end.

Maybe there’s more directions to go in, but I certainly can’t for the life of me find anything interesting.

It’s deeply frustrating, I struggled in vain for weeks upon weeks to find a topic that invigorated me, failed to do so, decided instead to research something arbitrary that seemed to have a lot of depth, and now it seems as though that has failed me as well. This seems to be a problem about how I approach academic thinking, there must be a more elegant approach than brute forcing a topic that one soon falls out of touch with.

For next term I really hope that I can find a better way of doing things. I think one of the ways of doing this is consuming more sound art – I plan on going to more exhibitions and reading more about sound art in the new year to see how others deal with these dilemmas, and I reckon that that may be enough of a tip off to get me out of my rut. Otherwise this will become a serious degree-risking situation.